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Ventriloquism and Revolution in Melville's Benito Cereno

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Ventriloquism and Revolution in Melville's Benito Cereno VOICES NOT ON ANY MAP: VENTRILOQUISM AND REVOLUTION IN MELVILLE’S BENITO CERENO, “THE BELL-TOWER,” AND THE CONFIDENCE- MAN: HIS MASQUERADE A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Master of Arts In English: Literature by Mimi Eleni Court San Francisco, California Fall 2018 Copyright by Mimi Eleni Court 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read VOICES NOT ON ANY MAP: VENTRILOQUISM AND REVOLUTION IN M E L V IL L E ’S BENITO CERENO, “THE BELL-TOWER” AND THE CONFIDENCE-MAN: HIS MASQUERADE by Mimi Eleni Court, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Art in English Literature at San Francisco State University. Sara^Hackenbmj Associate Professor Beverly Voloshin Professor VOICES NOT ON ANY MAP: VENTRILOQUISM AND REVOLUTION IN MELVILLE’S BENITO CERENO, “THE BELL-TOWER,” AND THE CONF1DENCE-MAN: HIS MASQUERADE Mimi Eleni Court San Francisco, California 2018 In The Confidence-Man, “The Bell-Tower” and Benito Cereno, Melville develops a whiteface ventriloquism to both study and overturn expectations about how power and inequality get mapped on bodies and in minds. In shadowy tableaus, he showcases black and socially dehumanized characters who wear their apparent servility as masks in order to seize control. Through this whiteface ventriloquism, Melville interrogates how racist and oppressive discourses never accurately name those whom they purport to categorize and explain. Melville points to the irretrievable consciousness of his protagonists, asking the readers to recuperate them from the silence to which the dominant discourse has condemned them. Juxtaposing Melville’s works to articles published simultaneously in Putnam ’s Monthly Magazine o f American Literature, Science and Art allows us to see how Melville creates an indirect, ventriloquized discourse, that forces the readers to decode what is left out of hegemonic narratives in order to discern and make sense of the legalistic and fictitious aspects of race as a construct. s a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank the generous professors of San Francisco State University whose courses have opened my eyes to the generative possibilities of writing and discourse. I thank my students, children, and friends for the daily reminders they give me of goodness and brilliance in the collaborative insurgencies of our present. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures.............................................................................................................................. vi Introduction.....................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Raving about things that could never have happened: Seizing the Master’s Voice in Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower” ..........................................................................................................................................23 Chapter 2 The Confidence-Man’s Masquerades: Uninvented Games, Common Justice, and the Metaphysics of Producing Whiteness and Blackness ...........................................................................................................................................53 Works Cited 93 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figures Page 1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper...................................................................... 85 It is not down in any map; true places never are. (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick) The soldier once more spoke; in a tone of suggestive dubiety addressing at once his associates and Captain Vere: “Nobody is present—none of the ship's company, I mean-who might shed lateral light, if any is to be had, upon what remains mysterious in this matter.” (Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor) Is ventriloquism a weapon of revolution? For Herman Melville - in his works which dramatize moments of antebellum insurgency - ventriloquism allows him to expose and overturn expectations about how power and inequality get mapped on bodies and in minds. Whereas in Moby-Dick, Melville imagines uncolonized places that are not on any map, in Benito Cereno, “The Bell-Tower,” and The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade he crafts whiteface masquerades, where both the voices and the bodies of free black characters are masked and unknowable within the discourse and text as articulated by the white male narrator. Yet, these free but masked voices and bodies beckon — like the uncanny figure of the cloaked Haman in “The Bell-Tower,” and the skeleton of Aranda in Benito Cereno — to relationships and modes of being which are not “in any map.” In this thesis, I argue that Melville develops a whiteface ventriloquism in order to investigate the inequalities structured through race in Antebellum America. Melville showcases black and socially dehumanized laboring characters who deliberately 2 exploit their apparent servility in order to seize power. The subaltern characters he develops find ways to speak through white characters, who retain the appearance of being their masters. Through this whiteface ventriloquism operated by subaltern characters, Melville interrogates how racist and oppressive discourses never accurately name those whom they purport to categorize and explain. By presenting servitude as a mask, and by collapsing differences between white and black bodies, Melville’s dramas sound “the structure of subjection” within all narrative with the aim, like that articulated by Achille Mbembe in Critique o f Black Reason and Gayatri Spivak in A Critique o f Postcolonial Reason, of representing ontological truths that are “not on any map,” or in the words of Mbembe, “to find the truth of the self no longer outside of the self but standing on its own ground” (29). Prompted by the reversals and silences of Melville’s whiteface masquerades, readers can begin to decode and envision those “voices not on any map,” effectively liberating the tale of the subaltern from the narratives of subjection that erased them. Melville focuses on how narrative and language can be used to categorially oppress others. However, through the ambiguous structure and ventriloquist masquerades of his narratives he also encodes the potential that these laboring and enslaved others may one day liberate themselves (this potential is the foundational repressed fear carried by whiteness, a fear so foundational that Melville’s text never speaks it directly). What would whiteness be without the blackness which constitutes it? Melville’s narratives trouble the very definition of whiteness and oppression, class and liberation, showing that the terms 3 themselves exist within an order built upon fundamental falsehoods, ignorance, silence, and confusion. In Critique o f Black Reason, Achille Mbembe argues that blackness and race appear as “foundational” and “delirious” structures in the era of modernity and that the black man “is the one (or the thing) that one sees when one sees nothing, when one understands nothing, and, above all, when one wishes to understand nothing” (2). For Mbembe, the process of creating a subaltern person (a nonperson, a person excluded) begins with a process which denies them a voice in court: The loss of the right to appear in court turned the Black individual into a nonperson from a juridical standpoint. To this juridical mechanism was added a series of slave codes, often developed in the aftermaths of slave uprisings. (19) Throughout his work, Melville dramatizes how racialized subjects are constructed through fiction, performance, and social (and legal) judgments. Thus, when Melville chooses to end Benito Cereno, with a legal deposition he produces a fictional work of documentary realism, which draws attention to the blind spots and ellipses of political rhetoric as it engages black and laboring bodies, encouraging readers to investigate both the specter of a slave revolt and the process which strips a set of people of their rights as humans “like all others” (48).' Readers are even more implicated in the process of 1 Jordan Peele describes his 2017 film, Get Out, as a social thriller and documentary. With its sudden revelations and reversals of power structures between blacks and whites, Melville’s Benito Cereno can also be read as a social thriller, which as Michael Rogin argues in Subversive Genealogy, is “realist in its attention to political rhetoric” (41) and which “invites strategies of unmasking [which] leave standing 4 judgment on board the Fidele in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade when we witness the specter of a drum-head court being enacted by the passengers interpellated into figuring out how to judge Black Guinea. “ Transforming the man into a block, or a loaded cannon Commodifying Race Melville’s insurgencies figure through “shadowy tableaus” that seek to be “explosive” enough to “break the web of mystification” that circles around the question of race and who counts as a full human being within the private and public discourses of neither the work of art as reflection nor the reality it was supposed to describe” (23). The work of contemporary African American humorists and public intellectuals producing social thrillers which satirically stage the trouble of thinking (and living) race - such as the work of Dave Chappelle, Spike Lee, and Jordan Peele — provide a useful contemporary frame for studying Melville’s work in The Confidence- Man and
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